Could have been the French Manouches. And about Bern, I think they're intended to host the Yeniche during summer.
I'm not sure what you propose here.

Oh, that reminded me, few years ago near we live one day showed up like 10-15 caravans with FR and CH plates. Parked in blue zone (max parking 48h), there was a nice picnic area with grill made by commune. Just trashed the place. Tell me about using taxed garbage bags, haha. Gone in few weeks. Most likely with the help of police. That was their holidays I guess or some big family meet-up.

In France it is quite problematic. Huge convoys of caravans go there during the summer months and just install themselves to whichever free space they find.

A non-fenced empty field with a fire hydrant nearby to use as water supply is a perfect spot. On top of that, they quite often try to plug power cables to wherever they can get away with (power plugs in neighbouring gardens etc)

I was baffled as to why the Police was doing absolutely nothing about it. When September approaches and it is time to move on, the aforementioned field looks like a landfill..

I fully agree that no-one should trash another's property, or leave litter in open ground. There's no reason to do that, when it is so easy to avoid.

You write: "Everyone is tired and no longer think that it is possible to integrate them into... a certain kind of (added by me) community. They, after all, have their own kind of community. If they are wanderers by nature and by culture, and see that as the right way to live, or if they can find no worthwhile life by settling down, then trying to make them fit into someone else's ideals of a fixed abode isn't likely to work.

I had a read of the Wiki Itinerant groups in Europe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itiner...Romani/Gypsies
which referred to one on Names of the Romani peoplehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Romani_people#Gypsy_and_gipsy and also, related to your concepts of punishment and expectation of forced change
to the stomach-churning page on Vagrancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrancy .

On the other hand, (and rather off topic, I admit) somehow the descriptions of being on the road again, ideally answerable to no-one, made me think about those people who've been cooped up working at home, in apparently acceptable professions, but who now want to break free, and are writing blogs to share tips on how to move visa-easy or visa-free, and to travel in vans and campers, or to stop off in villages and in beach cottages, to rest or to work as they will, with the wind in their hair, as digital nomads...

The big problem with the so-called ‘digital nomad’ life in Bali (19th June 2019)
https://www.news.com.au/travel/trave...3a1bfc7096076f

Willi Nelson - On the Road again (aged 87, in 2020)
https://youtu.be/Gdlyi5mckg0

Thanks for Willie Nelson! Stephan Eicher is jenisch, and one of the protagonists of a film about Swiss folk musicians I enjoyed very much. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ET0rvFlOQCQ I am willing to believe every last cliché about the musicality of the shiftless and marginalised, not least because many of the best street musicians I ever met looked like Roma, from Ljubljana to here. And because of „that gypsy from France“, as Woody Allen put it. It’s not only the Roma. As Isaac Stern said when asked what the difference was between the American and the Russian way of playing the violin: There is none. We send you our Jews from Odessa, and you send us your Jews from Odessa!

I‘m still working on whether to believe all the other clichés. Trauma, handed down over generations, can come to look deceptively like a culture. See the Sami, Native Americans including Hawaiians, Aborigines, and so on. Children separated from their parents, forbidden to speak their language and force-fed an education alien to their culture of origin. Some of that happened here, too. Are expats familiar with the Aktion „Kinder der Landstrasse“? https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder_der_Landstrasse

Here's something about the way the Jenische were treated in Switzerland, and the "Kinder der Landstrasse" programme to take children away from their parents, irrevocably.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yenish_people#Switzerland

From the 1920s until the 1970s, the Swiss government had a semi-official policy of institutionalizing Yenish parents and having their children adopted by members of the sedentary Swiss population. The name of this program was Kinder der Landstrasse ("Children of the Road").

What was ostensibly intended as a charitable effort to remove children from what was perceived as precarious conditions in a criminal milieu of homelessness and vagrancy was later criticized as a violation of the fundamental rights of the Yenishe to family life, with children separated from parents by force without due criminal procedure, and resulting in many of the children suffering an ordeal of successive foster homes and orphanages.[16]

In all, 590 children were taken from their parents and institutionalized in orphanages, mental institutions, and even prisons. Child removals peaked in the 1930s to 1940s, in the years leading up to and during World War II.

After public criticism in 1972, the program was discontinued in 1973.

I am. Terrible.

This is very good point! I also believe it is their true nature of wandering around and I respect that. They just happen to settle in country X, or Y. However taking up private land/house, stealing electricity, littering, not taking kids to school under certain age are crimes. When country tries to enforce the rules and punish for crimes, here appears human rights activists with "let's help them integrate" and here we go into vicious cycle.

I wrote that I'm familiar with this and it's terrible, but if we want to stay on topic, organised begging is not going to help anyone. Neither the beggars, nor the communities.

This is what I call fake charity (I am guilty myself here, I admit). These people need jobs, education. Otherwise the problem will continue to pass onto the next generation. The West doesn't do anyone any favour by allowing professional beggars take up streets or parks. This must stop.
IMHO, obviously.

I think what you are saying represents good common sense. The only people I give money to are street performers (singers/musicians or acrobatics etc), because they are providing you with a service that often deserves to be supported because it's actually good. That doesn't include the motionless statue people though.

The authorities have regularly offered them shelter, but they refuse since it means they would have to officially register. Y'all are so lovely and naïve.

I know these people in Basel are victims of a terrible system ... but they are lost beyond repair and I do find it difficult to sympathize with them over those who are truly experiencing misfortune.

I got stranded at Basel SBB without cash and a declined card some 15 years ago. I had no other option than to ask people to buy me a ticket home :/

Had a really tough time asking for the money because because of that pick up line. Took me quite some time to realise then asking for a ticket directly ( with the promise to send the 10 Fr via post) worked within a minute.

It's actually a common line used by some beggars in Zurich HB.

If they come from Romania (and I don't know why we are assuming this) they probably don't come from Bukarest but from some economically depressed area that is many many hours from Bukarest on a rickety bus.

These days you would furthermore probably need a PCR test to fly and this would set you back 150 CHF or more. I 'm not even sure if you can get one if you're here illegally.

Some do, though. At least at the time when the Basel TV investigations were made. It's embarrassing and frustrating.

https://www.20min.ch/story/jetzt-bet...r-789478617761

Yikes - they are sending children out, I've seen this plenty in Paris, but not here - Basel police need to step up. The more we allow it, the more these children are exploited by this awful system.

The lyrics of this song say it all ...

I think this is a question of sampling and perspective.

If you were to go for a drive around Chicago's south side or the uglier parts of Detroit and see some of the terrible conditions under which people live there, and also some of the attitudes that come with that, it would still be wrong to spin that into pronouncements on African Americans in general and say they are a depraved backward people with no ambitions or desire to improve their situation, but just live off handouts while trashing and graffitiing their own neighborhoods.

Such a conclusion would be outrageous.

But somehow it's okay to say the same about gypsies, basing it on some of the worst examples.

Reality check here for the Orban bashers.

A lot of the anti Roma rhetoric, at least on a political level, is coming from the right-wing Jobbik party. They are actually friends with the German Greens and get coaching and campaign advice from them. Now these friends of the German Greens like to blame the Roma for every evil under the sun. Yes even Orban is supposedly a Roma in their eyes and they often caricature him in Roma contexts. They claim his grandmother had a Gypsy sounding name, therefore he must be a thief. What more proof do you need?

Actually many Roma do support Orban, predominantly because his child-support policies make it easier for families with young children to buy houses rather than renting, by providing government backed mortgages and things. And strangely people who own stuff take more care of it than renters. And of course that makes the haters very angry.